“At the church, so many aspects of your life are controlled,” Grace says. “Having this new freedom, this ability to do things as we want to, when we want to, making all our own decisions – we’ve learned so much this way.”

“It was always very much all-or-nothing,” Megan explains. “The way the church presents it is, there’s the WBC and the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is evil. The WBC is the only place in the world in our generation that is telling the truth of God. Over time, those little things built up, and there were so many of them. Once you step out of it for a second, and you’re out of that vacuum, things change.”

That led to a decision to leave the square two-block section of Topeka where Megan and Grace say most followers of the WBC live. In what Grace describes as “the hardest day of our lives,” the two told their parents and their nine brothers and sisters that they needed to leave the church and their home.

So do the sisters have any regrets? “Hurting my mom was the worst thing of all,” Megan says. It was made clear when they left that they'd never be able to return. Once you're out, you're out.

“They believe that they cannot care about anything but what God thinks,” Megan explains. “And they are so sure about what God thinks that there can be no other option.”

“The thing is, they are trying to do what they believe is right,” Megan says. “We were taught that everyone outside the church wasn’t trying to do good. We know that they hurt so many people, and we see that now, but the majority of them are doing it from good intentions.”

And what does the future hold for the two sisters? Megan confesses, “I’m at a complete loss. But I do know that I want to do good, to have empathy. Even though we intended to do good [with the picketing], we hurt a lot of people.”